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What could Apple be thinking talking to Microsoft about making Bing the default search engine on the iPhone? Anyone who seriously believe Microsoft and Google have substantially different goals is deluding themselves.

Six months after the last big Firefox release, Mozilla today is rolling out Firefox 3.6. The new browser, which began its life under the codename Namaroka", includes numerous enhancement over its predecessor, Firefox 3.5.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Solaris today. Bordeaux 2.0.0 marks major progress over older releases. With version 2.0.0 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon.

At the Gran Canaria Open Desktop Summit in July 2009, the Open-PC project was announced. The statement said the project aimed to “cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community”. Further this PC would use only hardware for which there are free software drivers available. This would be a PC with the minimal compromise required for running a free desktop. In January 2010 the project announced the launch of its first product. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Earlier this week we published extensive benchmarks of EXT4 that looked at the performance of this Linux file-system under every major kernel release since it was declared stable in the Linux 2.6.28 release. EXT4 has encountered many significant performance losses over time as its developers batten up the data security, but there have been some improvements too. At the same time though the developers working on the still-experimental Btrfs file-system continue to move along and push forward changes with each kernel cycle. Just last month we delivered Btrfs comparative benchmarks using the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, but already out of our own personal interest and requests from readers, we have new tests atop the latest Linux 2.6.33 kernel.

Polish government wants to enforce Internet filtering to eliminate online gambling and child pornography. Everything for the benefit of our children, as this is the argument which is hard to stay against.

However, a notable group of Polish lawyers, journalists, academics, enterpreneurs, politicians and bloggers think otherwise and signed a letter to President of Poland, Lech Kaczyski, asking him to turn the law down (in Polish legal system, president has the right to do this, but the parliament can then overcome president’s opposition if 2/3 of the delegates vote for it).

You can sign the petition here.

This article explains how you can set up an SSL vhost under Apache2 on Ubuntu 9.10 and Debian Lenny so that you can access the vhost over HTTPS (port 443). SSL is short for Secure Sockets Layer and is a cryptographic protocol that provides security for communications over networks by encrypting segments of network connections at the transport layer end-to-end. We use the mod_ssl Apache module here to provide strong cryptography for Apache2 via SSL by the help of the Open Source SSL toolkit OpenSSL.

The European Commission has approved under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems Inc. by Oracle Corporation, a US enterprise software company. After an in-depth examination, launched in September 2009

In three relatively simple steps, you can create a virtual server on the Linux® KVM hypervisor host using full virtualization. The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is free, open source virtualization software for Linux that is based on hardware virtualization extensions (Intel VT-X and AMD-V) and a modified version of QEMU.

The second day of Camp KDE was filled with many more interesting talks. This day's talks were of the more technical nature versus the first day, and the KDE team took notes. As usual, the talks were recorded and videos will be available soon. A detailed rundown of the second day of talks are behind the link. The second day started with a keynote by Frank Karlitschek about KDE vs. The Cloud(TM), looking ahead a couple of years into the future. Frank pointed to the trend to use cloud based applications instead of desktop applications. The question this raised was: can KDE could provide a superior experience if we properly combine the advantages of cloud based technology with the freedom of open source and the power of desktop applications?

OpenOffice gets all the attention, but Linux gives you several excellent office suites to choose from. KOffice is fast, powerful, and has a nice clean customizable interface; Eric Geier shares some tips to help make your KOffice experience as great as possible.

Back in December Zeitgeist 0.3 was released with many changes and its engine was even largely reworked. Since then there have been a few point releases as GNOME Zeitgeist is in the process of being stabilized for a Zeitgeist 0.4 release in time for GNOME 2.30. Yesterday afternoon Zeitgeist 0.3.2 was released to deliver on more stabilization work along with better support for GNOME's Activity Journal. The release announcement can be read on the mailing list.

Chromium hacker Hexxeh has released a faster, USB-bootable build of Google's Chrome OS called Chromium OS Zero. Meanwhile, ArsTechnica interviewed Google's Engineering Director for Chrome OS, Matthew Papakipos on the past and future of Chrome OS. Hexxeh's final build of Chromium OS Zero follows earlier, well-regarded releases of versions including Chromium OS Diet and Cherry. Based on the open source Linux Chromium code that Google began to release in late November, with the goal of releasing a final Chrome OS for netbooks later this year, Chromium OS Zero promises major speed improvements "for many users," according to Hexxeh's blog announcement.

There are several reasons you may want to create a local repository. The first is that you want to save on bandwidth if you have multiple Ubuntu machines to update. For example if you had 25 Ubuntu machines that all needed updating at least once a week, you would significantly save bandwidth because you could do all but the repository locally.

he installation is just the beginning of the work. It is very important to install OpenSIPS correctly from the source code. It can be installed much faster from the Debian packages or using the apt-get utility. However, installation from the source code is much more flexible as it allows you to select the modules to be compiled.

Microsofts new Gazelle concept is the greatest thing to hit Linux or the computer industry as a whole ever. According to Microsoft, Gazelle is a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. I never thought I would live to see the day that Microsoft announces its own suicide.

As Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) nears its April 2010 launch, Canonical is taking steps to make Ubuntu Linux more attractive to business customers. The efforts include new support pricing plus closer relationships with application developers. Here’s some analysis.

The glorious weather that had punctuated the first two days of the conference held, heralding in the third day in a blaze of sunshine. The conference proper was introduced by a keynote by Benjamin Mako Hill on Antifeatures: Why your software works against you and why software freedom offers hope of a better future. Mako explored the concept of anti-features as deliberately included functionality or a lack of functionality that users hate so much they will pay to have them removed. Some classic examples included the gator spyware that was included with free version of p2p software on the windows platform - with a spyware-free version available for a fee.

GNOME Activity Journal is not a File Browser but an Activity Browser. It uses Zeitgeist to get information on what files/websites/contacts/etc. you worked with and Tracker to get information about the current state of the files and all sorts of meta-data

My initial reaction was, "yeah right". You see, over the years, I have seem many geek attempts to stretch the capabilities of a platform with "proof of concept" type products.